How can you move your business forward…

… when your strategy process goes round in circles?

 

Growth brings rewards, but it also makes things more complicated. More paperwork. More analysis. More questions. It all puts pressure on your people, and makes decision-making and prioritising more difficult. It can put the whole business under strain.

So you need a strategy that’s strong enough to support your ambitions. The challenge is not just to build a bigger business, but to build a better one at the same time. The deeper your foundations, the higher you can build.

But as a CEO or Managing Director, you know how hard it is to get people to think strategically. People get bogged down in semantics. (“Is that vision or a mission?” “That’s not a goal, it’s an objective.”) Everyone brings along their hobbyhorses to trot around the boardroom. And meetings are routinely hijacked by current operational concerns. All in all, the typical discussion about strategy is draining rather than stimulating.

Why it’s hard to be “strategic” in a growing business

There’s often a gulf between what you say in your strategy or business plan and the realities that your employees are facing day-to-day.  Here’s why:

1. The cost pressures are tougher than ever – The promised ‘economies of scale’ never seem to materialise… Margins get diluted by newer, less-successful, products. Fixed costs rise inexorably and you can’t raise your prices to compensate. So you have to restrict marketing spend, which of course limits your growth.

2. Everyone is firefighting – Organisations inevitably become more complex as the business grows. Everything is a priority. The small stuff takes over. Your people struggle to find the time to spend on the important things.

3. Managers aren’t stepping up to the next level – Your top team is managing rather than leading; working ‘in’ the business rather than ‘on’ it.  And so it goes, all the way down the organisation. Managers don’t manage so much as supervise. Supervisors aren’t supervising, they’re doing.

What you really want instead

You may relish planning – or you may view it as a ‘necessary evil’ to help produce better results. In either case, what you really want is a blueprint for better growth so that you can:

1. Win in the marketplace, by being clear about how to delight your customers, and by outsmarting and outperforming your competitors.

2. Build a business that will last, with a clear and compelling purpose, a robust business model and an enduring brand.

3. Create a buzz around the business, with your top team leading, inspiring and engaging all your people.

These things won’t suddenly materialise by themselves, but there is a way of bringing them about…

The solution? ‘Built for Growth’

‘Built for Growth’ is a 9-month in-house programme offered exclusively to CEOs or MDs and their leadership teams – up to 10 people in total.

The programme gives you all the help you need to create – and implement – a robust plan for long-term growth. A growth plan that your team ‘owns’ and which motivates your entire workforce. Built for Growth gets your whole organisation focused on providing a better customer experience than your competition.

It’s fully tailored to your company’s needs. It includes workshops, coaching, training and events to help you get new insights into your industry and your business.

The foundations of the Built for Growth programme

What’s special about this programme? There are many consultants out there who can help you put together a strategy or a business plan. You have many alternatives. Here are some of the things I strongly believe in. They’re at the foundation of this programme, so it may appeal to you if you believe in them too:

Firstly, you’re more likely to act on your own answers than on someone else’s. There are industry experts for hire who can offer you answers, but those answers may not be quite right for your situation. Instead, as a coach and facilitator, I focus on asking you the right questions so that you come up with your own solutions.

Secondly, any plan is only as good as your ability to implement it. It takes up to three months to settle on a strategy, but I’ve found that it typically takes a further six months to know that the changes are working, so that’s how long the programme lasts. It ain’t over until we’re sure that the needle has moved.

Thirdly, clear English beats complex management-speak. The day-rate business model for most consultants motivates them to pad out their work by making things more complicated than they really are. And gurus love to make themselves sound smart with high-concept jargon. By contrast, this programme concentrates not on complexity but on making things crystal clear.

Finally, being in charge can be a lonely business. So the programme is more than just a set of processes and workshops and action plans; it also gives you personally the chance to have confidential conversations, and to get support, challenge and feedback.

The main benefits of the programme

Here’s what you’ll have when the programme is done:

1. A strategy built around enduring customer needs. The purpose of a business is to satisfy customers profitably, and the role of C level executives is to create and implement a strategy to do that. So this programme gives you a practical, structured way of defining a customer-led strategy, such that it will last the test of time. It’s a blueprint, a document, but it’s also alive. Its purpose is to shape and inform the decisions of managers for years to come.

2. A plan to outsmart and outperform your competitors. Imagine the information you’d gather if you were a fly on the wall of one of your competitors’ board meetings. That’s impossible, not to say illegal and unethical, so we do the next best thing. I help you to simulate a competitor’s board meeting and get you to think like they think. This gives you powerful new insights into what your competitors are likely to do, and helps you to deduce how you can outsmart them.

3. A motivated leadership team. To help your team step up to the next level, I use leadership training and psychometric tools like MBTI and FIRO-B. I help them to better understand themselves – and each other. I also offer coaching and leadership tools which can be used at your team’s discretion.

4. An aligned and inspired workforce. If you can tap into people’s deeper motivations, you can release a huge amount of discretionary effort. But typically, everyone only takes part of themselves to work. They compartmentalise and they do what they need to do to get by. I use a powerful method of cascading your growth blueprint, which encourages everyone to become accountable and helps them to become more fully engaged.

Further benefits

You’ll have dedicated time to concentrate on what really matters. Workshops are properly planned and documented so that everyone knows what is being discussed and what has been agreed. The programme materials are in everyday English and jargon is banned.

You’ll know where you are and how you’re doing. I create a clear map of your strategy, and help you track your progress in making it happen.

Everyone will be clear about who’s accountable for what and when. I continually update the action plans online, and I’ll hold your team’s feet to the fire so that stuff gets done.

Your team will have a growing feeling of mastery. There’s a nice word in Greek which has no direct English equivalent. Meraki: doing something with soul, creativity or love. It’s the satisfaction of doing something valuable, doing it well, and doing it better than anyone else.

What’s in the programme?

There are three stages, lasting nine months in total. You can sign up for just the first one or two if you wish – but the most transformational results will come from going through all three stages.

Stage 1. Clearing the ground. We get straight into action by identifying the biggest barriers in your way.  This often involves elephants in the room, sacred cows, ostriches with their head in the sand and other beasts.  So this stage begins with confidential interviews during which people can say whatever is on their mind. Then I’ll put together a prototype strategy for clearing the path. It’ll be provocative, and probably wrong, but it gives you something to work with or fight against. Together we’ll figure out some bold first steps. And we’ll be moving.

Stage 2. Designing the blueprint. The second stage lasts 3 months, during which we create a compelling blueprint for better growth. Typically, this will involve around 12 days of workshops and other events, supplemented by specific coaching and training. We’ll face some more difficult truths in this stage too, but it will be complete when we have a powerful and persuasive blueprint, and a plan that everyone subscribes to.

Stage 3. Building for growth. Finally, we have to get the whole company moving, with an implementation and tracking stage, lasting around six months.  This stage is all about accountability, delivery and overcoming blocks.  It’s achieved through around 20 days of further workshops, update meetings or conference calls, action planning and coaching.

There are also these bonuses

Online resources. Throughout the programme, you’ll have access to resources and study guides outlining best practices in many of the topics we cover (e.g. strategy tools, visioning, scorecards, leadership and management skills).

A secure data hub. If you don’t have an intranet, I organise all the programme materials, files and up-to-date action plans on a data hub with password access for you and your team.

A graphical strategy summary. Once your plan is created, I use a graphics specialist to summarise it in picture form. I then distil this to a one-page giveaway for briefing and reminding your workforce. It’s a great way of capturing the essence of your plan in an easy-to-understand way.

Actionable book summaries. Additionally, each month I’ll send you and everyone in your team action-plan summaries of excellent business books which are relevant to the stage of the programme we have reached. Examples include: Jim Collins’s Good to Great (on building enduring businesses); Adam Morgan’s Eating the Big Fish (on taking on larger competitors) and Tom Hanson’s Who Will do What by When? (on coaching and accountability).

Is the Built for Growth programme right for you?

This programme is designed specifically for successful mid-sized businesses. Typically my clients are organisations with between 100 and 250 people, and with revenues of between £20m and £100m. And they have one or more brands which they want to develop further.

The sector doesn’t matter. The programme and its components have been researched, designed and successfully run with mid-sized to blue-chip clients across Europe and the US, and in industries including food and drink, pharmaceuticals, sportswear, telecoms, IT, information publishing, professional services and others. Nowadays I restrict location to the UK, as the programme involves plenty of face-to-face contact.

What about you personally? The success of the programme hinges on the personal relationship that we develop. (It won’t work with bosses who have a ‘because-I-say-so’ attitude, still less with cynics or bullies.) The best results come if you share some or all of the following traits: you’re enthusiastic, open to change, focused, keen on quality, humble, thoughtful, a big believer in people and teams, keen on learning and development, a good communicator and a bridge builder. Just as you want your company to move up to the next level, you too want to move to a new level of leadership. You want to channel your ambitions into creating something really special – a winning business where people love to work.

Here’s how to find out more

You may have many triggers for considering the programme. Maybe you or some of your top team are new to the business, for example. Or perhaps the track record of growth has faltered, or the marketplace is evolving fast. Or possibly your existing plans just feel stale, and you feel the need to strengthen your foundations.

If you’ve read this far, and you think you might be interested in the programme, I invite you to contact me for a complimentary ‘Built for Growth’ Strategy Session. This is a no-obligation way to find out more about the programme and whether it’s right for you.

In that session we’ll explore what challenges you and your top team are facing, what kind of results you’d like to see instead, and whether this programme could help or not. Whatever the outcome, you’ll leave the conversation clear about the issues you’re facing and excited about what’s possible.

The session will take about an hour and can be done in person or by phone. Please contact me using the form below to set up your ‘Built for Growth’ Strategy Session. I look forward to our conversation.

With best wishes,

Charles Kingsmill